Remove Topics From Your Facebook News Feed

If you follow me on Facebook, chances are you’ve seen me post about my favorite Chrome Plugin – Facebook Ultimate Filter. I was fortunate enough to install it before it was removed from the Chrome App store and let me tell you, it has saved my Facebook experience. It’s a plugin where I give it keywords I don’t want to see and *POOF* I don’t see them.

This is a feature I have been harping on Facebook to add FOR YEARS! Facebook claims we have control on everything – our data, or followers, our friends, our apps, etc. but do we have control of our feed? Not really. Just because I follow someone doesn’t mean I want to see everything they post about. What if I didn’t want to see posts about a TV show or movie I haven’t seen? Or how about a political topic or company I don’t care for? Nope, no control there.

Until now. Facebook has quietly added a new feature to help stave this off. By now I’m sure you’re familiar with the Snooze feature that works for People and Pages. If not, here’s a quick run down. On either desktop or mobile you can tap the three dots in the upper right hand corner and you’re given options about that post. One of them is to Snooze that user for 30 days. Basically, that removes that person from being in your News Feed for the next month. Here’s an example of what that looks like on Desktop:

When it comes to this post, let’s say I don’t want to see posts about #retail or #networking. Looking at the desktop options this isn’t very helpful. I don’t want to snooze this account because they post helpful content. It’s just this one post with a couple of specific hashtags because they’re going to an event I don’t care about. So as is, the desktop version isn’t helpful for what I want to do. Let’s take a look at the mobile version.

Ah ha! Now we’re talking. Notice the new option above “Snooze keywords from this post”? When you tap that, Facebook tries to identify what the post is about then gives you the option to Snooze that topic for 30 days. When you tap that option, you’re taken to the topics Facebook thinks the post is about. Here’s a look.

I’ve used this a couple times and to he honest, it’s hit or miss on the topics. It works great if hashtags are used in the post. I have yet to see Facebook not include the hashtags as an option if its in the post. Snoozing keywords also works well for names and places. For this post I was hoping it was going to grab “American Junkie” since that’s the title of the event and in the post as Caps but it didn’t. Oh well. Once you find the keywords you don’t want to see, I simply tap them so they turn blue then hit the button at the bottom.

Once that is done, then you get a confirmation message with the option to undo if needed.

Like I said, I’ve been using this for a couple days mainly to hide election content. Since I am making the changes to my News Feed I’ve noticed it removed that content regardless of what device I am on. Why this isn’t an option on desktop yet? Not sure. I believe this is a new feature so who knows, maybe if people starting using it more maybe it will move over to all devices.

Summary:

You can now hide keywords/topics from your News Feed for 30 days.

Facebook guesses what topics you want to hide and lets you pick which topics to hide. You can not add your own keywords (let’s hope this changes).

Snoozing Keywords works great for posts that include hashtags, people, locations, etc.

Snoozing only available on Mobile but once snoozed it’s hidden for all devices.

It works in News Feed. You can not navigate to someone’s timeline, select a post, then snooze the topics.

It does not work for all posts. I’ve found it does not work for all shared posts, posts to groups, events, etc.

If there’s something you want hidden – Snooze it!

As always, thanks again for taking the time to read my posts. Let me know if there are questions.